What’s scarier? Finding out that your checking and 401K are managed by decades old COBOL programming? Or that AI will replace it almost overnight?

Photo above - official headshot of Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic. He predicted in his blog yesterday (once again) that his Claude AI system will soon write all the software code on planet Earth. Is Dario the Elon Musk of AI?

Full disclosure: I used to work at a money center bank. (Call center operations). Very labor intensive. The only thing MORE expensive/labor intensive was the IT (Information Technology) department. Millions and millions of bucks annually to repair and sustain ancient COBOL software written nearly a generation ago.

COBOL is expensive to repair and maintain that some bank and wall street IT departments gave up. They offshored this job to outfits in India and Pakistan. This is cheaper, but those coders typically disappear forever 15 seconds after the job is done. They left behind minimal documentation about their work. Anyone who sat through an end-user requirements or test review meeting where half the participants are on teleconference from Karachi and Mumba knows the pain of this. (What the eff did he say again? No, turning the volume up DOESNT help. It makes it worse)

Anthropic announced it can do away with all that. Just turn the coding over to Claude AI. Software update cycles will shrink from years to a few weeks. Most of those offshore contractors never get hired. This seems like it SHOULD be a win-win, right?

People who own IBM stock apparently think so. In the midst of yesterday’s snow bomb cyclone there was a blizzard of Wall Street sell orders for IBM. Share prices dropped the most in 25 years within just a few hours. Because IBM consultants and programmers are apparently part of the secret sauce that keeps this ancient tuna and mac casserole edible. And Claude is going to fix everything.

And maybe it can. Maybe AI will actually be able to build viable defenses against all the programming flaws that bedevil money management. Hackers, ransomware, DDOS attacks, wallet thefts, identity spoofing, bogus orders. Maybe these will all be fixed by a couple of chips in a little black Anthropic box, and we can kick back and watch Netflix.

Except the little black cable box already under my TV can’t even get real time closed captioning right. AI can't legally or competently drive a car. The last time it tried (with Tesla) self driving software had 4X as many accidents as human drivers.

According to various surveys, It takes a dedicated team of human software engineers LONGER to finalize AI generated code than it would have to make it from scratch with just humans. But the silver lining is that there are fewer humans involved, from start to finish).

Let's imagine the future. Your nearby ATM doesn't work. The bank website is down. How long will it take human repairmen to take apart AI Cobol code and find out what’s happening? There may not be consultants or contractors who have ANY IDEA what the AI bots wrote, and which lines of code failed.

I don’t predict that AI will be a complete failure forever at writing code. Just that selling your IBM stock because of some Anthropic press release on a snow day is probably an overreaction.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

IBM shares plunge as Anthropic touts COBOL modernization | Financial Post